Kenya woman’s ordeal highlights newly identified sex trafficking route
T
his is a sad story and ordeal of young Kenyan woman tricked into traveling abroad with the promise of a better paying job as domestic worker. This is her story – (J is initial of her real name to protect her from any form of harm by this organized trafficking gangs in Kenya and elsewhere in East Africa). J’s cousin promised her a well-paid job in India as a
housekeeper. Instead, she found herself in a brothel in India until the United Nations brought her home to Kenya when it was alerted that she was a victim of the human trafficking trade. When she got there, her passport was confiscated and she was forced into sex work to pay off $9,000 her traffickers demanded she owe them for bringing her over to India. This criminal gang is composed mainly of fellow East Africans. They told her she owed them this amount for her traveling
and lodging expenses, she said in an interview on her return from her ordeal in Nairobi, Kenya. In the past year, the International Organization of Migration (IOM) repatriated at least 12 Kenyan women who had been trafficked to India, the first time it said it had been asked to help Kenyans there. Most Kenyans who have been trafficked end up in the Middle East, especially Saudi Arabia, according to Kenya’s National Crime Research Center, which did not have a more specific country-by-country breakdown available. Very often in the past few years, reports of Kenyan women being abused and enslaved in those Arab countries make the headlines. Now IOM worries that the economic fallout of the corona virus lock down in East Africa will make people more vulnerable to exploitation, at home or abroad. Nearly a third of low-income Nairobi residents lost their jobs in the past months, and another 15% who had been self-employed are without work, a July 2020 survey from Nairobi-based market research firm Tifa Research showed. IOM flew J home weeks before Kenya’s closure of its borders against the spread of the corona virus. The borders have since reopened from August 1st 2020. “With the economic losses that we are experiencing as a result of the pandemic we are potentially going to see more cases (of people) being trafficked or re-trafficked,” said Sharon Dimanche, head of the IOM in Kenya. J, who had been diagnosed with cancer and had leapt at the chance to save money for treatment, said her experience shows that Kenyans should be wary of job offers abroad. “I never thought I would get back to see my kids,” she said. “When they took me to the embassy, I could not believe I am going to see my family again and not return in a coffin.” Reporting by Ayenat Mersie. Editing by Katharine Houreld and Philippa Fletcher
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